Indian Craft Beers You Should Try

From mansworldindia.com

If you’re looking to expand your beer vocabulary, you’re in luck. A surge in the number of home-grown craft beer brands has taken place in the last couple of years, with many new varieties – India Pale Ales, stouts, wheat beers and more – being brewed in places as diverse as Goa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Bengaluru, Pune and even Bhutan. These beers differ significantly in appearance and flavour from regular, mass-produced brands, and here is our pick of the ones available.

Mead, although not really a beer, deserves special mention. It is widely accepted as the oldest known alcoholic beverage. The oldest confirmed evidence of an alcoholic beverage comes from Jiahu in China, around 7000 BC; farmers were fermenting a drink from rice, grapes, fruit (hawthorn berries) and honey. Many other written records indicate that honey was being fermented across various cultures, including in India; there is an entire chapter in the Rig Veda that focusses on the production of mead, named soma wine. In recent times, home brewing and amateur wine-making clubs have paved the way for the strong comeback of a craft mead culture in many countries, specially in the USA, where mead is the fastest growing alcoholic segment.

In India, mead has made a comeback with the launch of Moonshine Meadery, in Maharashtra. It was cofounded by Rohan Rehani and Nitin Vishwas in Pune more than a year ago, and their mead is available in 375 restaurants and retail outlets across Mumbai, Pune and Goa. The three flagship sparkling mead variants – traditional mead, coffee mead and an apple cider mead – have year-round arability, and they keep experimenting with micro batches in different styles and flavours. The alcohol content in all the variants does not exceed 6.5%

Traditional mead is a honey wine made only with a blend of honey, water and yeast. Moonshine Traditional mead is made with special single source Ajwain (Caraway) honey. It has rounded honey notes and with time devolves a mild floral note on the nose. This off-dry, balanced, traditional mead makes for easy drinking, and the bubbles help keep the palate alive.

Melomel is a mead fermented or flavoured with fruit, and a melomel made from apples or cider is called Cyser. Moonshine Apple Cider Mead is made with multi-floral honey and apples from Kashmir. Medium golden in appearance, this off-dry, refreshing mead expresses a nose and flavours of cider and honey. Mild tannins from apples add texture, balance and overall complexity to the mead.

Metheglin is a mead fermented or flavoured with herbs or spices, and the Moonshine Coffee mead falls in this category. It’s made by cold- steeping artisanally roasted coffee from Karnataka into a multi-floral honey. This off-dry style of mead has a nose and palate of freshly brewed mild coffee, complemented with notes of honey in the background. Overall, it’s a balanced mead, with a medium finish

https://www.mansworldindia.com/drinking-man/indian-craft-beers-try/